In order to diagnose diseases occurring in a human body, tissue inspection, in which tissue of an area suspected of diseases is extracted and examined to diagnose diseases, is used.
For the tissue inspection, tissue is extracted using a method such as cell aspiration, gun biopsy, incisional biopsy, or excisional biopsy, and then the extracted tissue sample is sliced to produce a slide, dyed, and then observed with a microscope. In the process of producing a slide, an extracted tissue sample is hardened by fixation, dehydrating, etc., then sliced, dyed, and covered with a cover glass.
After the slide is produced in this manner, a physician in charge of pathological diagnosis and judgment can observe the tissue slide through a microscope and make an accurate diagnosis decision.
Modern people suffer from various diseases, and a variety of diseases including cancer are being treated by a surgical procedure to extract a problematic organ. However, when a surgery is performed for the extraction, the position and range of a target area to be extracted, such as tumor tissue in an organ or lesion of a human body, is usually determined by the naked eye and experience of the operating surgeon. Therefore, determining the range of the tumor tissue for extraction is limited to the range that is observable by the physician with the naked eye, and it is difficult to determine whether or not a small region that is too small to be observable with the naked eye corresponds to a tumor. As a result, for example, when tumor tissue is extracted for cancer surgery, in order to prevent the tumor from remaining, it is normally necessary to extract a region that is wider than the tumor tissue observed by the naked eye, causing an additional burden on the patient's recovery. There is still a problem that it is impossible to identify a tumor that is not exposed to the surface, despite removing a larger area than the tumor tissue.
It may be dangerous to extract an area larger than an actual extraction target. For example, when performing a thyroidectomy, the parathyroid gland, which perform functions such as calcium metabolism or hormone secretion, should not be excised from a functional perspective. However, it is not easy to clearly distinguish between normal thyroid tissue, a parathyroid gland, lymph, or removable adipose tissue with the naked eye. In such a case, it is impossible to perform a surgery in which the portion including the tumor is widely extracted as in the above-described method of cancer tissue extraction.
In order to solve the problems described above, the above-described tissue inspection is used to understand what kind of tissue the extracted tissue corresponds to and in what condition it is. However, tissue inspections that are generally used often take more than a few days in order to understand the result thereof due to a process of fixing the tissue sample by a fixation fluid in order to produce a slide, the congestion of pathologic inspection, or the like. Thus, it is difficult to use such tissue inspections in order to make a decision on the tissue during surgery. In a frozen specimen inspection or frozen slice inspection that is used in order to solve these problems, tissue is frozen rather than being fixed, and a slide is produced by slicing the frozen tissue. However, this process takes at least 30 minutes, which is a great burden for both the surgeon and the patient.